Aston Villa manager Steve Bruce has admitted that his side will need to "put something of a huge run together" if they are to bounce back to the Premier League this season.
The Midlands side are without a win in their last six league games and their most recent outing, a 2-1 defeat at Nottingham Forest on Saturday night, left them 13 points off the playoff places.
With just 17 games of the season remaining, Bruce thinks that the challenge of making the top six may now be too tough an ask.
"We will never ever give up. We can't. But we've got to be realistic," he told the club's website. "We've got to put something of a huge run together.
"It's up to me now to try and get a bit of stability into the team. We've made something like 40 changes in two transfer windows, it's huge. So we've got the makings of a very decent team I think.
"We've got two at the top (Newcastle United and Brighton & Hove Albion) who are a threat to anybody in this division.
"We've got to be defensively better though. If you look at 29 games, I think it's six clean sheets. We need to be defensively better and give them the platform and this weekend we nearly got there."
Villa have only spent 23 seasons out of the top flight of English football since the league was formed in 1888.
Neil Wilkes
